It clears whether you’re standing there or not.”

He bounced on his heels twice, and something crossed his face and got put away again.

“Then I’d better be standing somewhere else,” he said.

The tires threw up a fan of water off the asphalt, and he was gone before I got the bag off my shoulder.

I slept in the truck that night with the seat back and my jacket for a pillow, and at eight the next morning Sarah Jenkins tapped her metal pen on the edge of her clipboard and told me to sit down.

“My supervisor approved a violation hearing,” she said.